Patch Note:1.0.16.0
This is our first deployment of the localized game. Work is ongoing – there is text yet to be translated and UI tweaks to accommodate the various languages – but you can now for the first time run the game in French, Spanish, or German. In theory, if you select a language in LaunchPad, that’s the language the game will run in. If that fails you, however, you can run the game with a command-line switch from a DOS prompt: PotBS.exe -lang fr_FR will bring up the game in French PotBS.exe -lang es_ES launches in Spanish PotBS.exe -lang de_DE launches German Known Issues * Loading… screen lasts longer the more recipes you’ve learned. We fixed it and re-broke it. We’re gonna re-fix it in the next patch. * If you try to create a character and it won’t let you into the world, see if you have an error in your game log about “invalid secondary color … for palette PLT_Eye.” If so, change the eye color for your character and then try to enter the game. We’ll get this fixed for launch. Differences between 1.0.13.0 and 1.0.(16).0 include but aren’t limited to: Open Sea * There's a bug that NPCs are using the wrong values to determine how fast they sail on the Open Sea, which made them really hard to catch or to flee from. We massively nerfed their OS speeds as a temporary measure until we have a code fix. * Fixed the Open Sea speed of the Neptune's Disgrace. * The combination of Acceleration and Battle Speed doesn't predict Open Sea speed anymore, so we removed that part of the max speed tooltip. Ships / Outfitting * The 'Postillionen' Frigate had 185 crew, but it was supposed to have 120. Fixed that. * The 'Bermuda' Trader's Sloop was available to all careers. Restricted it to Freetraders. * Tuned the speeds of several ships a little more. Now that we’ve solved the crazy high end speed issues, we are making incremental changes to increase the gap between faster and slower ships. * Reduced the weight of general loot and mission loot so that it's not above 1 (unless it modifies max crew). Slightly reduced the weight of consumables and of permanent outfitting. Also reduced the weight of ammo crates. All of this is to further bring the weights in line with the new cargo capacities. * Increased the capacity of the stripped Lexington, Stralsund and Defiant. * Fixed the collision values for the 'Pommern' Frigate and the 'Tigre' Frigate. * Reduced the turn rate of the 'Pommern' Frigate to 9 and added 2x8lb bow and 2x18lb stern chasers. Made other tuning adjustments on the Pommern as well. * Discovery: Fixed a bug that made it sail way too slow. It's now 14.75 speed. * Lancer: Reduced accuracy bonus to 1, cut structure and armor bonuses in half. * Expedition: Added accuracy bonus of 1, reduced structure/armor bonuses, added mast integrity bonus. * Fallen: Added accuracy bonus of 1, reduced structure/armor bonuses, added mast integrity bonus. * Trader's Bermuda: Added an extra cannon to each battery, added a major reload bonus, slightly reduced armor/structure bonuses. * Gave a real name to the new polacre: it's now the 'Mystique' Polacre * Fixed a major bug where the navy level 50 career skill was not set correctly to no-respec. Ship Combat * We had places where you’d zone in to an ad hoc and you or an NPC or someone would land outside the valid space for sailing around in. That would cause all sorts of havoc, including players stuck until GMs could kick them or players being displaced by several thousand yards from the battle. We’ve changed the max ad hoc spawn distance from 1000m to 500m from the flashpoint. We’ve also updated all of the ad hoc maps to move the flashpoint placer at least 800m or so from the nearest navmesh edge. We also made ships spawn closer together in ad hocs. The values are now 250-500 yards instead of 500-1000 yards. We’re hoping for no more Murphy Spawn havoc. * Fixed ad hoc client notifications to display the correct “NPC.FULLNAME” message when distant group-mates are attacked. * Limited AdHoc battles to 6 ships per nation. Missions * Added a tiny mission to introduce you to the Tortuga smuggler’s tunnels that allow faster travel between districts. * When you are escorting an NPC avatar in a mission, the NPC could sometimes run off and attack everything in sight. We have changed their behavior so they will stick with you better and mostly just fight in self-defense. Also dampened some avatar agro chaining problems in some missions. * Removed some duplicate mission seeds from the Pirate trainer. This should improve performance in certain Pirate towns. * Added Writ Missions to the Prize Agents in the Admiralty/Crime Lord's office in the capital cities (Port Royal, Tortuga, San Juan, and Pointe-a-Pitre). The Writ missions allow you to take the Writ along with an Uncertified Deed and transform them into a real ship deed. * Changed the rewards for the Freetrader commendation missions, adding the Pommern Sleek and Pommern Heavy writs to the turn-ins (at 10 and 30 commendations, respectively) and moved the Mastercraft Pommern writ to the 60 commendation turn-in. * Added a new Pirate commendation mission for 30 Battle Ensigns, which awards the Pirate Pommern Heavy writ, and added the Pommern Sleek writ to the 10 Battle Ensigns mission. Added a Tavern to Portobello. It had been removed which broke some missions. * (25) If you died in “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan”, your allies stopped helping you when you came back with Smelling Salts. Fixed that. * (25) French and Spanish Privateers were not being offered the career ship refit reward in “Stealing Their Thunder”. Fixed that. * (45) If your allies sunk your enemies in “The Hunt Is On” or if you won the mission in any but the most straightforward way, trying to leave would report that you hadn’t succeeded. That turned out to be a combination of about three different bugs. Fixed now. * (50) Pirates couldn’t do the conquest reward mission "Chasing the Money" if they took it from a French owner. Fixed. Economy * Adjusted the ratio of cash and treasure items to make it more balanced. You shouldn’t get tiny amounts of doubloons anymore, but the overall value of cash + treasure items adds up to about the same. * Added the missing Pirate writs for the Pommern * Added some resources to Pirate ports in the Gulf of Mexico. Carlos Harbour got the Harbor and Fir resources, and Turpitude gained the Iron resource. This will allow pirates to operate medium shipyards in the (relative) safety of the Gulf, if they're willing to make the trip from the Yucatan to Mexico to Florida. It also gives them a solid iron manufacturing base in the northwest corner of the Gulf. * Improved text color on cost in Warehouse tooltip so it’s easier to read. PvP / Conquest * Made PvP Marks of Victory only rewarded for level 10 and higher kills. * The voluntary PvP flag protected you from NPC agro protection on the Open Sea, but also prevented NPCs in ad hoc combats from attacking you which was horribly broken. We turned off the NPC agro protection feature but it will come back before launch. * The port unrest generation multiplier has been set high for a while to enable faster port conquest in the beta. It is now set to its actual launch value so we can test that in the Open Beta. Further adjustment is likely. * Moved the Pirate-PvP and everyone-PvP thresholds from 6k/8k to 5k/7k, giving an extra 1k of everyone-PvP buffer before a port goes into full contention. * Changed the decay timer from 600s to 300s, so 5 minutes of no unrest activity will cause decay to start. Also changed the unrest decay rate so as to cause a port to decay from 7000 unrest to 0 in 48 hours. * Set the unrest decay rate on all level 1-15 ports, regardless of their default owners, so that one minute of no unrest activity will cause a port to start shedding massive quantities of unrest, and it will fall to 0 in 12 hours. Combined with the new global unrest multiplier, and the lower levels of ships near noobland ports, this should make flipping noobland ports into PvP something that only a dedicated, organized, effective group will be able to pull off. * You used to have to click on a small boat to enter the fort or town in the Landmark Battle. Not everyone figured this out. Replaced those with docks which hopefully make more sense. UI * We had a bug that caused the server selection screen to show the lowest populations as being the highest. Fixed that. * Fixed the bug where clicking on the Open Sea map (M) would erase all the port markers on that map. * Preference sliders should uniformly have Performance on the left and Quality on the right. * Some used to be that way and others were the other way and it was confusing. * Made additional UI adjustments in Character Creation, Chat, Mission UI, Preferences, and other windows to accommodate localized text. Art * Set the minimum value of the Max Visible Avatars slider to 20 instead of 10, since in some towns with lots of mission and service NPCs you wouldn’t see any players at all on the lowest setting. * Fixed some performance problems in Tortuga. Servers * Made the flogger perform better, we hope. One of the major causes of the need to reboot the cluster during Stress Test II was that the flogger died from overuse. We’re hoping we’ve fixed that. * Improved the flow of communication in our Server Directory application to minimize collisions we were experiencing during Stress Test II. * Cache server was crashing every few hours for a while there. Fixed that. * Various other server performance enhancements as a result of the second Stress Test. * We had a bug where database corruption would cause the server cluster to shut down. Fixed that. Misc * We no longer give you XP when you are at the maximum level. (When we up the max level during the Open Beta, you’ll start getting XP again so you can continue to level up.) * Reduced the minimum level for the Nation chat channel from 5 to 2 * Fixed a bug that caused everything in the game to go gray when you cleared your screensaver. Category: Beta